You play ordinary people who owe somebody money, in a world that has already been won by the wrong side.
The rules are few and simple, and anyone can sit down at this table: newcomers, veterans, and the merely curious. What matters is the story the table builds, and nobody in it is a hero. Your character is a carter, a midwife, a man who came back from a levy, and the reason they walk out of the door tonight is that a person who holds their debt told them to. Saving the world is not on the table. Getting out from under a man with your name written on a page is.
Risky actions are resolved with six-sided dice, and the dice answer a particular question. Not "do you succeed", but "what does this cost you". The results shape the story, and the story is what happens to ordinary people standing in front of extraordinary dangers.
The system is built first for self-contained adventures (one-shots), where your character quite probably does not live to collect. It is also built to survive that: death has its own rules, and a campaign of one-shots can follow a single soul through many bodies and many years. Nothing stops you from running a long campaign, whether your character survives their misadventures or not.
You are in Sakkaris. The year is 353, counted from the night the crystals took the world's magic away.
This is what you need to sit down and play. The deep history is somebody else's problem, and mostly your character's grandparents did not know it either.
The Immaculati. They came out of the ash of that night as a holy order sworn to scour magic off the face of the world, and they have been at it for three and a half centuries. Five provinces answer to them, each named for its capital, and each capital rides on the back of a giant. The Titans walk, and the cities on their shoulders walk with them, so the map is never quite the same twice.
Their creed is simple, and most of their own soldiers believe it: magic is a sickness, and the world will be clean when the last of it is burned out. The Inquisition does the burning. Denunciation pays well. Families go into the camps on the word of a neighbour who wanted their house.
The D.O.C. closes wounds and breaks fevers, and it is the only treatment the law allows. The Immaculati make it, the Immaculati sell it, and it is quietly addictive, which is how a regime that owns the only medicine ends up owning everyone who has ever been ill. What it is made from is not written on the bottle.
Twenty years ago the sky came apart, and it never closed. The Rift hangs over everything, visible from every province on a clear night, and it has been there long enough that children born under it have never seen a sky without a wound in it.
The Immaculati did not need it. They had held this country for more than three hundred years by then, since the night the crystals broke, and their soldiers were in every province long before the sky tore. What the Rift gave them was permission. Look up, they say. That is what magic does when nobody holds it down. Every checkpoint, every camp, every knock at the door now has the sky itself for a witness, and a grip that was already tight closed harder.
What tore it, nobody in the street can tell you. There was a Resistance once. There were rumours about what it set out to do, and then there was the Rift, and after the Rift there was no more Resistance. Whether it died out there or only went quiet, nobody knows. It is finished, people say. They say it softly, and not everywhere.
Two ways, and the old way is still the more dangerous.
The old way is people. Informers, rewards, a frightened neighbour, a child who repeated something at school.
The new way stands in the main square of any town worth watching: a Red Sentinel. Work any magic inside its reach and it flares red and sounds, and the reach is wide, often the whole village, a whole district in a city. It does not say who and it does not say where. It says only that somebody here, just now, did the thing. Then the district is sealed and the soldiers start at one end.
Here is what your character almost certainly does not know, and the game is built on it.
Everyone alive carries a god inside them. Not as a figure of speech: a sealed, imprisoned soul, forced into a body long ago and unable to leave it. The link between the two is the Bond, and while your Bond is intact you can reach what is chained in there and make it do things. That is all magic has ever been.
On the night the crystals broke, most people's Bond was cut for good. That is why magic is rare now, and why the few who still have it are hunted.
The people who fear it call it the Ether and believe it belongs to a god named Jaar. They are wrong, and it changes nothing, because the Inquisition burns you for the Ether just the same.
The same seal that traps the god inside you also traps it here. When a body dies, what was in it has nowhere to go. It waits, and it enters the next thing that is born.
So nobody in Sakkaris is here for the first time. Your character has died before, many times over, and remembers none of it, and will most likely go to the grave never learning it. It changes nothing about tonight, which is the point: the world runs on a wheel nobody in it can see.
Four things the Immaculati do not own. The free City-States, bound in a defence pact and being invaded one at a time. The Spires, where the red crystals grow out of the ground. The Corrupted Lands, which are worse than the regime. And the Kingdom of Tolaria, a country of mages thought lost for centuries and lately returned, which will take in anyone running from the purge, if they can get there.
Not a hero. Nobody is coming to save this, and you are not going to fix it either. You are a person in a bad country trying to get through the night with the people you care about still breathing.
The world is not asking to be saved. It is asking what you do on the evening the Sentinel goes off two streets away, and then somebody knocks at your door.
Memento Mori is played by talking. The Master describes the world, you say what your character does, and most of the time that is the whole procedure. You walk, you ask, you search, you haggle, you run. Nobody rolls anything.
Dice come out for one reason only: something bad is hanging over what you are about to do, and nobody at the table knows whether it will land. If nothing threatens you, you simply do the thing. If the bad outcome is certain, no die will save you, and the Master should say so instead of asking for a roll. The dice live in the space between.
Before any roll, the Master tells you what is hanging over your head, and says it in the language of the world:
That sentence is the Threat. It is always concrete, always spoken before the dice, and always something your character could perceive by reading the situation. You are not seeing the future. You are noticing the hand on the whistle, the way anyone standing in that line would.
When the Master names a Threat, they also tell you its weight, because the same danger does not always weigh the same.
Then the die does the same work at every weight. A 6 keeps the consequence off you altogether. On a 4-5 you get what you wanted, and the consequence brushes you: a smaller taste of what was named. On a 1-3 it arrives exactly as the Master named it.
A Dire moment is the exception, as it always was: there is no gentler shape for it to take. Only a 6 keeps it off, and anything else lands in full.
This is what makes the game a conversation instead of a series of tests.
No die is touched until you say you are going through with it. You hear the Threat, and then you choose. Ask what you are risking. Ask what else is in the room, whether there is another way round, how long you have. Change the plan, take the slower route, spend something you would rather keep, send someone better suited, or walk away from the whole thing. Every one of those is a real answer, and a good one often deletes the roll: a different approach means a different Threat, and sometimes no Threat at all.
The Master will never ask you for a die you did not agree to. Once you commit, the Master confirms the roll and you pick up the dice. Until then the danger is only information, and information is what it is for.
And when nothing real threatens what you are doing, there is no roll in the first place. You simply do it.
For the Master: state one Threat, name its weight, and know its brush before the dice move, because a middle result will ask you for it. "She arrests you" brushes down to "she has you walked off to the magistrate for verification". "The bridge gives under you" has no brush, so it is either Dire or it is the wrong Threat for this roll.
The Master also answers your goal honestly, in the world's words. "Words can get the two of you through; the cart gets searched no matter what." If you want more than the situation offers, change the situation: offer the coin, find the side gate, come back at night. There are no effect categories to negotiate. There is only what the fiction, at this moment, will give.
Find the Action that matches what you are doing. You roll a number of d6 equal to its rating and keep the single highest die.
You can grow the pool in two ways:
Example. Dario cannot resist killing small things. He is at a side door, working a bribe into a guard's pocket, and the Threat is plain: the guard takes offence and turns him away. Dario's player leans in. "While my hand is in his pocket I see a sparrow settle on the branch beside me. I take it out of the air, quick, and crush it under my shoe. Then I look back at him, and my face has not changed." The Master does not say the word Urge. He says: "Take the extra die. And understand what you have done to this. He is not going to refuse you politely now. If this goes wrong he arrests you as something dangerous, and if it goes very wrong he draws on you." The sparrow is dead either way.
| Highest die | What happens |
|---|---|
| 6 | You get what you wanted. The consequence does not happen. |
| 4-5 | You get what you wanted, and the consequence brushes you: a smaller taste of what was named. |
| 1-3 | The consequence arrives in full, exactly as named. |
A Dire moment has no brush. Only a 6 keeps it off, and a 4-5 lands in full, exactly like a 1-3.
Notice what the table does not say. It does not say "you fail" anywhere, because failure is not a separate rule: it lives inside the Threat when the Master puts it there. If the Threat was "she stops believing you and has you arrested", then a 2 means exactly that, and no one needs to ask whether the bluff worked. If the Threat was "the boy runs to the palace to check your story", then even a 2 gets you through the gate, with the worst version of that problem now running ahead of you.
Extra sixes. More than one 6 changes nothing by itself. The highest die is the answer, and the answer is already the best one.
Magic is will made manifest, and it obeys a harder table than skill does.
A magic roll is always made as an unrated action: 2d6, keep the lowest, and no rating you ever gain will change this, because the people who could have taught you control were purged before you were born. Help cannot add dice to a magic roll. Nobody can will alongside you.
On a magic roll, the Threat is never "nothing happens". The will always manifests. The Threat is what else manifests: too much of it, the wrong target, the shape of what you wanted turned sideways, or eyes you did not want on you. Only a 6 gives you exactly what you willed. Everything below it gives you your will, bent.
That is the part that belongs to the dice. Everything else about magic, the Bond and its cost, the six Schools, scrolls, charged items, and how the regime notices, has its own chapter.
When a Threat lands and what it leaves behind matters past the end of the scene, you and the Master write a [Consequence] on your sheet. A [Consequence] does not have to be flesh. A jaw that clicks when you chew, a debt, a reputation, a face that every guard in the district half remembers: anything the world will not forget about you.
This is true however the roll fell. If you let the Master's narration stand, the [Consequence] is the full weight of what happened, and it costs you nothing but itself. If you spent a life to escape, the [Consequence] is the brush of what you refused, and you helped write it. Either road can mark you. The difference is how deep, and who held the pen.
When a [Consequence] plausibly interferes with an action, that roll loses one die. A pool reduced to zero rolls as unrated: 2d6, keep the lowest.
There is no timer on a [Consequence] and no slot to erase it from. Whether it can leave you is a question for the fiction: a cracked rib mends if someone binds it and you rest; a face memorized at a gate cannot be unremembered. If you want one gone, do something in the world about it, and the Master will tell you honestly what that would take.
You gain nothing here by defeating things. You gain it by coming back, and by what you were willing to take on the way.
Experience is tracked by category, not by Action. Your sheet carries three tracks of six, one under WITS, one under NERVE, one under WILL.
At the end of a session, mark:
A Threat you escaped by spending a life marks nothing. The life is what happened instead of the Threat, and you cannot learn from a thing that never touched you.
When a track reaches six, clear it and raise one Action in that category by one, to a maximum of 3. The track is the restriction: any Action under that heading is fair, including one you have never had a point in, which goes from nothing to 1. So the Action you were forced into badly is an Action you can learn.
This means a specialist grows and a dabbler grows slowly, because everything you do lands in the same three places. Leaning into what you are is the fast road. It also means a category eventually runs out: once all three of its Actions stand at 3 there is nothing left to buy there, and by then you have survived more sessions than most people at this table ever will.
Experience does not survive you. It buys ratings, and ratings belong to the body. Whatever you had banked goes into the ground with it, along with your [Consequences], and your next character starts with seven fresh points and three empty tracks.
Death is not a special subsystem. It is a Threat like any other, with one absolute constraint: the Master must put it on the table before the roll, in the world's words.
That is the whole rule. When a Threat stated as your life lands in full, you die, unless somebody spends a token to escape it and you carry the [Consequence] of how close it came. When it only brushes you, you live, and what it leaves behind is usually the heaviest kind of mark this game has.
Death never ambushes you from the dice. If the Master did not say your life was on the table, it was not.
And some things do not ask the dice at all. Charge three armed men bare-handed, walk into the garrison wearing a hunted face, drink from the wrong cup in the wrong hall: when the fiction makes death certain, the Master does not call for a roll. The Master says "if you do this, you die", and means it. One thing saves you there, the same thing that saves you everywhere: a token off the table, spent by you or by anybody else at it. Spending always works, against a landed Threat, against a certain death, against anything. You die when nobody pays, or when you decide that nobody should.
The table shares one pool, and it sits in the middle of the table where everybody can see it: one token, plus one for each player. Two players have three. Four players have five. Playing alone with a Master, you have two.
They are not health, because bodies in this game have no health. A token is a pass on the story itself, the one currency that buys the pen out of the Master's hand. Spend one to decide that a moment goes another way: the blade misses, the rope holds, the thing you wanted happens after all.
Spending is narrating. When a Threat has landed and you refuse it, you do not announce a rule. You keep narrating: "at the last moment I throw myself sideways, and the blade takes my arm instead of my throat." The table understands what just happened. One token off the table, and the escape always works, because that is what it buys.
There is no free version of that sentence. Narrating what happens after the dice have spoken belongs to the Master, and the one way a player takes that right is by spending. So if you describe your character slipping the consequence, you are paying, full stop. If you do not want to pay, the Master's words stand, and you answer them in character.
Anyone can spend, on anyone's moment. The pool is the table's, not yours, so the question is never whether you can afford it. It is whether the table can. If Elara has the spear coming down on her and Marco reaches for a token, Marco narrates, because whoever pays holds the pen, always. Maybe his character shoulders her aside. Maybe the world itself twists in the telling.
Every spend leaves a mark on whoever was saved: a [Consequence], written together with the Master as the brush of the thing that was refused. The rules for what a [Consequence] is and does are above.
The pool does not refill. Not with rest, not with prayer, not with anything this world sells. A new session lays out a fresh one, and this session gets what it was given. When the last token is gone, the world simply does what it does, and the next thing that lands, lands.
That is the reminder the title promises. Two or three passes between four people is not a safety net, it is a conversation, and somebody has to say out loud that this moment is the one worth spending on.
Elara is bluffing her way through the gate of a protected village. The Master has stated the Threat: "the guard does not fully believe you, and anything you carry that looks like trouble stays on her table." Elara rolls Manipulate and her highest die is a 4. She gets what she wanted, and the consequence brushes her.
Master: "She waves you through. Then, as you cross the gate, she catches your wrist. 'The dagger stays here. Regulation.' She is confiscating your father's dagger."
The player now has two roads, and the game never asks which one out loud.
Road one: let it stand. The Master's narration is what happened. The player answers it in character: "Fine. I hand it over, teeth clenched, and I memorize her face." Play moves on. The dagger is gone, and maybe that face becomes a scene later. Nothing is spent.
Road two: take the narration. The player does not announce a rule or say a keyword. They take over the telling of the moment, which is the one thing only a life can buy: "The moment her hand comes toward me, the dagger is already sliding into my sleeve, and what I press into her palm is the kitchen knife I eat with."
That sentence is the whole procedure. The table hears it and knows what it means: a token has just been spent. The escape works, always, because that is what it buys. No roll, no cost to calculate. The player takes one out of the middle of the table.
Then the mark. Master and player write the [Consequence] together, a smaller and permanent form of what was refused: "The gate guard of Vessa knows my face, and she knows my hands are quick." From now on, whenever that fact could plausibly interfere, the roll loses one die. Walking back through that gate. Talking her sergeant out of a search. Any table in Vessa where she might be sitting.
Master: "She weighs the kitchen knife, snorts, and tosses it into a crate. The dagger is in your sleeve. Take a token, and write her down."
There were three tokens on the table when the session started. That dagger, on this morning, cost the whole party one of them, and nobody else got a vote.
Your character is gone for the rest of the adventure, and you are not. How a dead player finishes the session, and what happens between one adventure and the next, is in When You Die, further on.
Creating a character is fast, and designed to throw you straight into the action (and, probably, toward an early death).
Define the essence of your character by answering three questions. Keep it short: one line each is plenty.
Nobody asks why you go. The person holding your paper sends you, and the only other road out of that room is dying in it.
Every character has a dark pull, a fetish, a mania that torments them. Choose your Dark Urge, tell the Master privately, and write it on the back of your sheet or on a slip. The Master knows it. The other players do not, and they never need to: they will learn what you are by watching what you do. It is yours, and it will surface at the least convenient moment, or when you decide to let it drive you (see Rolling the Dice).
Distribute 7 points among the Actions, grouped in three categories. No Action may start above 2, so a new character carries points in at least four of the nine, and two dice is as good as anyone gets on the day they walk out of the door. On your sheet, write only the Actions where you placed at least one point.
Read the names wide. They are short labels for large things, and taking them literally is the most common mistake at a first table. Hunt is not only for hunting animals.
Hunt. Reading a trail and following it. Tracks in mud, a broken branch, the direction a frightened person ran, how long ago a fire went cold. Finding what somebody hid. Laying a trap and having the patience to sit by it. Knowing where an animal, or a man, will go next.
Study. Looking at something closely enough to understand it. A document, a seal, a symbol, a machine, the shape of a ritual. And people just as much as things: what a face gives away, what the hands do while the mouth is talking, whether a story holds together, what someone in front of you actually wants.
Tinker. Fine work with the hands. A lock, a mechanism, a knot, a forged seal, a pocket emptied without its owner feeling it, something delicate mended, or something delicate quietly ruined.
Fight. Doing harm on purpose, with a weapon or without one. Standing your ground, putting someone on the floor, holding a doorway while the others get out.
Sneak. Not being seen and not being heard. Moving through a place you have no right to be in, going still in shadow, slipping a watch, climbing a wall, following someone who would kill you for being noticed.
Wreck. Force against things rather than people. A door off its hinges, a chain snapped, a cart tipped, a wall brought down, a machine ruined. Also plain endurance: carrying, holding, forcing on when the body wants to stop.
Command. Making people do as you say. An order given so that it is obeyed, a threat that lands, a frightened crowd held together for one more minute, someone stopped where they stand by the way you said their name.
Comfort. Reaching the better part of a person. Calming someone past reasoning with, sitting with the dying, earning trust from somebody who has none left to give, talking a desperate man down off whatever he is standing on.
Manipulate. Getting there crookedly. A lie told well, flattery, a bribe dressed as a favour, misdirection, letting someone believe the thing that happens to suit you.
Where two Actions could both fit, the player says which one they are using, because they are the one who decided how to do it. The Master takes the Action that matches what was actually described.
This is the part worth understanding before anything else, because it is where the game opens up.
Nobody ever rolls to get past a guard. There is no Action called that. You say what your character actually does, and the Action is whichever one that turns out to be. Which means the situation never dictates your Action: your idea does. A player who thinks about what is lying around can nearly always find a way to use the Action they are strong in, instead of the one the scene seemed to demand.
You want to be inside the city, and a guard is watching the gate. The obvious roads in are Sneak, or Manipulate to talk your way past, and if your character is poor at both then this looks like bad luck. It is not. Look at what is around you instead. There is a loaded cart waiting in the queue behind you. "I crouch down by the cart and work the pin out of the wheel, so the whole thing goes over into the crowd." That is Tinker, and Tinker is what you are good at. Notice what else changed: the Threat is no longer the guard at all, it is being caught with your hands on the wheel. And if the wheel goes, you walk in through the noise while everyone is looking the other way.
Changing your approach changes the Threat with it, and sometimes removes it. That is not the Master being generous. That is the whole game.
As a guide:
No Action may start above 2.
Example. Marco is creating Elara. Background: "a former army scout, now a lone huntress." Dark Urge: "a kleptomaniac, she cannot resist small shiny things." Background gives 1 point to Hunt and 1 to Sneak. The Urge gives 2 points to Tinker, for locks and quick fingers. With the free points Marco raises Hunt to 2, adds 1 to Fight, and puts the last on Study, to read her prey. Final build: Hunt 2, Sneak 1, Tinker 2, Fight 1, Study 1.
Everyone in this world carries magic, sealed, and nobody knows it. At creation, you may choose to be one of the few born half-conscious of theirs. The full rules live in the Magic chapter. What matters here: the choice costs you at creation (an Awakened character distributes 5 action points instead of 7), it grants one School of magic chosen now, and it is born secret: reveal it or keep it hidden, your call, and revealing it in this world is a dangerous thing to do.
You pack before you play. Everything you carry, worn and stowed, goes into a pack of sixteen slots, and how full it is sets your load: Nimble, Loaded, or Overloaded. Choose freely, talking each pick over with the Master and the table. The full rules, what each thing weighs and what each load does to you, live in the Equipment chapter. To start:
Everything you carry rides in a pack of sixteen slots. What you put in it is a real choice, because weight is a Threat waiting to happen: the more you carry, the slower and the louder you move, and there is always a night when that is the difference between the door and the dark.
Your pack is a grid of sixteen slots, four across and four down. Everything on your person sits in it, worn and stowed alike: the armor on your back and the sword at your hip count the same as the rope coiled in the bottom.
Every item has a shape, a footprint of one or more slots (see What Things Weigh). Place your gear however it fits, and turn a shape when you need to. Orientation is not cosmetic: it decides how deep into the pack a thing reaches, and depth is exactly what it costs you. If a thing will not fit in the sixteen, you do not carry it.
Your load is the deepest band your gear reaches, and nothing else. You do not count slots.
The board is printed in three coloured bands: the top two rows are green, the third is amber, the last is red. Pack your shapes wherever they fit, then read the deepest colour you are touching.
| Deepest band you occupy | Load | At a glance |
|---|---|---|
| green only, rows one and two | Nimble | quick and quiet |
| amber, row three | Loaded | the honest compromise |
| red, row four | Overloaded | slow and loud |
This is why the pack is a grid and not a number. Empty slots do not save you. If the only way a long sword fits is standing upright through the red row, you are Overloaded with two amber slots still sitting empty, because the sword is in the red and so are you.
It also means packing well is a real skill, and worth the minute it takes. That same sword laid flat across a green row costs you nothing. Turning a piece of armour on its side can buy back a whole band. You become Overloaded by carrying things that will not sit shallow, not simply by carrying a great deal.
What the bands do:
You can always drop what you carry. Setting the pack down, or cutting it loose, costs you nothing in the fiction: an Overloaded pack falls to Nimble in the time it takes to shrug free. Everything you dropped is now on the ground behind you, and getting it back is its own scene.
| Item | Slots | Shape |
|---|---|---|
| A small item: a potion, a scroll, a charged item, throwing weapons, one tool kit | 1 | 1×1 |
| A one-handed weapon, or a pair of light ones | 2 | 1×2 |
| A shield, or light armor | 4 | 2×2 |
| A ranged or two-handed weapon | 4 | 1×4 |
| Heavy armor | 8 | 2×4 |
| An unusual weapon or item | 1 to 4 | by what it is |
A ranged or two-handed weapon is the awkward shape in the game. Four slots in a straight line will lie flat across one row and cost you nothing, but the moment the top rows are taken it has to stand upright, and standing upright it reaches the red.
Heavy armor is the other one to think about. Laid flat it is four across and two down, which is the whole green band exactly. Wear plate and nothing else and you are still Nimble, but you have spent all of your green: the next thing you pick up, whatever it is, puts you in the amber. That is the bargain of armour, and it is why a soldier in full plate with a shield is Overloaded before he has packed a single rope.
The sundry gear a life needs takes one slot each: thief's tools, arcane instruments, alchemical ingredients, tomes, tricks and disguises, hunting gear, camping gear, the tools of a trade. A scroll and a charged item (see the Magic chapter) are small items, one slot each, and a satchel of them can weigh a mage down as surely as plate weighs a soldier.
Worn armor and a raised shield can take a blow meant for you. Each piece of armor carries a [Defense], and heavy armor carries two; a shield carries its own.
When a physical Threat lands and would mark your body, you may spend a [Defense]: the armor takes the hit instead. The [Consequence] goes on the armor, not on you, a dent or a split strap or a cracked plate, and that [Defense] is spent. You walk away whole, and your gear wears the day.
A shield answers only a blow you could meet head-on. It does nothing against what you cannot face: a fall, a knife in the back, poison, a fire you cannot turn.
Refresh a spent [Defense] when you can rest and see to the gear, or when it is properly repaired. Armor beaten past use guards nothing until it is mended. And remember the price written into the slots: heavy armor keeps you safest and drives you hardest toward Overloaded.
Everyone in this world carries magic, and almost nobody knows it. It sits sealed, the way a voice sits sealed in someone who has never spoken. The people who could have taught you to open it, and to hold it once open, were killed before you were born. What is left of their work is hunted: the Awakened, the scrolls, the few objects that still hold a charge.
Working magic where it can be seen is the most dangerous thing a person can do here. Nothing in this chapter changes that.
A magic roll is always made as an unrated action: 2d6, keep the lowest. No rating you ever gain will change this, because the people who could have taught you control are gone. Help cannot add dice either. Nobody can will alongside you.
The Threat on a magic roll is never "nothing happens". The will always manifests. The Threat is what else manifests: too much of it, the wrong target, the shape of what you wanted turned sideways, or eyes you did not want on you. Only a 6 gives you exactly what you willed. Everything below it gives you your will, bent.
At creation you may choose to be born half conscious of your magic. It costs you: an Awakened character distributes five action points instead of seven. In exchange you choose one School, and you are born knowing it.
Nothing about that choice makes you a mage in anyone's eyes but your own. There is no order to join, no master to find, no word to say. There is only what you can do, and what it costs you when you do it.
A School is a wide territory of will, not a single trick. Inside it you may attempt anything the fiction can bear. The Master tells you, in the world's words, whether the thing you want still lies inside your School, and states a harder Threat the further you reach from its heart.
A School does not widen across your life. What widens is your cunning in using it.
The six Schools are the six Exarchs: the six great shapes a will can take. The old academies classified magic this way, and the classification outlived the academies that burned. The Apostle sealed in you is almost certainly not an Exarch, but its will still falls into one of the six shapes, because those six are the shapes of all of them.
Every School carries a face, and most faces carry a corrupted form: what answers when a will goes wrong, and what a mage risks drawing, or becoming.
[Binding] Themis: law, justice, peace. Corrupted form: Astaroth. Holding the world still. Ward a door, seal a thing shut, bar a way, pin a body where it stands, bind an oath, banish what does not belong here. What else manifests: it binds more than you aimed at, it holds you along with the rest, it does not let go when you want it gone.
[Ruin] Jotunn: the hunt, victory, vengeance, balance. Corrupted form: Sithis, called Surtur, the fire that ends the world. The destroying elements: fire, lightning, wind, force, heat. This School unmakes. It does not build. What else manifests: it spreads past your intent, it is bigger than you meant, it takes the wrong target, it lights the dark for every eye.
[Forge] Andraste: war, blood, wrath, nature, the forge. Corrupted form: Kalarati, the Black Knight, who forged the demon-swords. The shaping of solid things, dead and living: metal, stone, wood, bone, flesh. Shape, shatter, mend a blade or a body, open a wound, rot, grow. What else manifests: the work comes out flawed, it demands material to eat, it heals crooked, it sets permanent when you wanted a moment.
[Mind] Voluptas: trade, thieves, eloquence, beauty, art. Corrupted form: Moloch. Thought and what people believe they perceive. Fill a room with something that is not there, plant fear, lull to sleep, take a memory, press one small certainty into a head. What else manifests: it leaks to people you did not aim at, it rebounds on you, they feel the intrusion and know it for magic.
[Fortune] Ebisu: abundance, games, fortune, wine, folly. No corrupted form. Luck, curse, coincidence, omen. Bend the world's die your way, lay a curse, read what is coming. Ebisu alone was never corrupted, and he is alive, and he walks the world. Of the six, this is the only School whose face can be found and spoken to. What else manifests: fortune balances, the price lands on someone you love, the curse turns back.
[The Veil] Telos: desire, search, discovery, the infinite. No corrupted form: Telos survived the tearing of the Veil, but he is gone from the world, held far beyond it. Everything on the far side, and everything that crosses. Speak with the dead, see spirits, drain a life to feed a will, raise what should stay down, open a way, call something through. The dead and the called belong to one School because they are one act done in two directions. The Veil is a single door, and this is the art of standing at it. What else manifests: the dead want more than you offered, what answers is not what you called, the way does not close, you draw eyes across the Veil.
A scroll is a will already shaped, written down by someone who knew control, and sealed on the page.
Reading a scroll never fails. There is no roll. The written will manifests, exactly, once, and the page is spent.
Anyone can read one. The magic is in everyone, sealed, and the scroll is the key, not the lock. This is why finding one is an event, and why the regime burns them where they lie.
Knowing what a scroll does before you read it is another matter. Identifying one is a Study roll, and the Master states the Threat before the dice, like any other.
Never failing is not the same as never costing. Reading one aloud in front of eyes is still magic done in front of eyes.
Nobody knows what a found object does. Not the players, and not anyone they can ask: the people who studied these things are ash or behind wire, and the regime melts down what it finds.
Some objects are charged. Every use dims them, the touch and the glow fading step by step, until the power dissipates for good, and whoever has not understood the thing by then never will. Others are relics, worked in the ages before the Night of the Crystals: the power is woven into the thing itself, and it never fades.
Finding out what one does happens by talking, at the table. Describe the object, the sensation of holding it, the air around it. The players examine it, experiment, and guess. When a guess is heading somewhere you like, narrate it true. When it is not, narrate something else. It ends when the players stop, out of fear or because they believe they have understood, or when the object goes dark from too much testing, which is how a table learns that some of these are charged. There are no dice in any of it: dice decide what a dangerous moment costs, never what you find out.
At the table:
Used under real pressure, a charged object moves like any other magic: the will manifests, and what else wakes is a roll, 2d6 keep the lowest, with only a 6 coming clean.
An Awakened hand feels one layer more than anyone else's: whether the power is charged or woven, and, when it is of their own School, a rough direction. Direction, never detail.
The Immaculati find magic two ways.
The first way is the old way: someone saw, and someone talked. Denouncing a mage pays. Sheltering one costs, and it costs your family too. The arithmetic of an ordinary household is against you before anybody even lies.
Working magic in front of witnesses is a Threat like any other, stated before the roll, and it scales the way Threats scale: a servant who saw, a patrol that was told, a name that reaches the wrong desk.
The second way is new. The Immaculati have built machines that sense the use of magic. They are rare and enormously expensive, so there are few of them, and one stands at the center of a settlement, in the main square.
Its reach is wide. In a village, one Sentinel usually covers the whole village. In a large city, one covers an entire district.
Work magic anywhere inside that reach and the Sentinel goes red and the alarm goes up. It does not name you and it does not point at you. It says only that magic happened, somewhere in this district, now.
That is what makes it dangerous. The town itself has noticed, and the quarter becomes a net: patrols in the streets, every face inside the circle suspect, yours among them. Getting out of range is rarely a few steps. It can mean getting out of the town.
Past the last house, on the open road, magic is only as loud as its witnesses.
Death ends a body. It does not end your seat at the table.
Nobody paid, or you decided nobody should. The Master narrates your death, and you get the last word inside it: what your character does, says or reaches for while it happens. Say it at the table, in the fiction if you can.
Your character is gone for the rest of the adventure. The dice will not bring them back, and neither will a token spent late: the pool buys escapes from Threats that are landing, not resurrections. Let the scene weigh what it weighs.
A dead player is not a spectator. The world is full of people, and one of them is about to matter.
Look at the fiction. Who is there? The porter hired at the village. The prisoner the party freed two rooms ago. The guard who has stopped believing in her orders. If nobody fits, the table invents someone plausible on the spot: the beggar who has been tailing the expedition since the gate and turns out to be a veteran with reasons of his own. The dead player takes that person over and plays them for the rest of the adventure.
Build them the way you would build anybody, quickly and by chance rather than by choosing. Take a background, spread seven points across the Actions with nothing above 2, give them a Dark Urge, and put three or four things in the pack. Roll for the Bond if you want to know: about one person in five still carries an intact one, and an Awakened body spends five points instead of seven. Do not agonise over any of it. The player is going to find out who this person is by playing them, and if the dice hand the porter Command 2, he was never just a porter.
A taken-over body is a whole person, so it has its own Dark Urge and its own gear. What the player does not have is anything the dead character had: no [Consequences] and no experience. They are playing somebody else, in the middle of somebody else's day. The pool in the middle of the table is unchanged, because it never belonged to the person who died.
If the player has grown attached by the end of the session, the body is theirs to keep. Nothing has to be added, because everything a person needs was on the sheet from the moment you rolled them. Otherwise, thank them and let them walk back into the world.
Keeping three of these in your notes is worth more than any rule on this page, because a body falls in the third hour and you want a person standing right there. Use them as they are, change a detail, or roll your own.
Perrin, a carter with no cart. Heavy, with a scar that pulls one eye half shut. He agrees with everything you say and then does what he meant to do anyway. Hunt 2, Wreck 2, Fight 1, Tinker 1, Comfort 1. Dark Urge: he takes one small thing out of every house he enters, and he keeps them all. Carries: a mattock, thirty feet of rope, a tinderbox that works on the third strike, a coin from a country that no longer exists.
Isaure, a midwife nobody calls any more. Small, with forearms stronger than the rest of her. She washes her hands whenever she is thinking about something. Comfort 2, Study 2, Sneak 1, Tinker 1, Manipulate 1. Dark Urge: she cannot leave a dying thing alone, and she has been wrong more than once about who was dying. Carries: a boning knife in an oiled sheath, a roll of bandage boiled and used before, a lantern with one candle left, a lock of hair in a twist of cloth.
Warin, a levy man who came home. Young, bad teeth, stands closer to people than they want. Fight 2, Sneak 2, Hunt 1, Wreck 1, Command 1. Dark Urge: he has to be the one who speaks to soldiers, even when everybody else needs him quiet. Carries: an old cavalry sabre with no scabbard, a patched waterskin, a whetstone and a rag of oil, a letter folded so often the creases have gone soft.
Make a new character. Seven points, a Dark Urge, a debt, equipment, and a place at the next table.
You are the one at the table without a character to hide behind. Your job is not to win and not to lose. Your job is to hold the world steady and honest while the players push their ordinary people into it, and to name the danger clearly enough that every choice they make is a real one. The rules you run are thin on purpose. Almost everything you do lives in one act, repeated: you look at what a player is about to attempt, you decide whether anything truly threatens it, and if something does, you say what it is, out loud, in the world's own words. Everything below is how to do that well.
You are not the players' opponent, and you are not their author either. You keep the fiction consistent, you speak for everyone who is not a player, and you decide the one thing the system leaves to you: whether a moment is dangerous enough to reach for the dice. Hold these principles while you do it.
A new group starts in debt, and so does a group starting again from nothing. Each of them fell into it their own way, and what they share is the person holding the paper. That is enough to put four strangers in one room, and it is where a first session opens.
Ask each player why their character owes. A season's work borrowed against and lost. A funeral somebody had to pay for. A name kept off a list, every month, for years. Then decide who holds all of it, and the choice is wide: a butcher who lends on the side, a factor of the D.O.C., an officer with a private ledger, a widow who bought the paper cheap. Ordinary people fall into debt with ordinary people, for ordinary reasons, and none of that needs explaining to anybody at the table.
The room belongs to him and it says what he is before he opens his mouth. The back of a shop with the meat still on its hooks. A counting room over a dispensary with the queue audible through the boards. A station room where the drain in the middle of the floor is the only clean thing in it.
He came to collect, they begged, and what he says now is that there is something they can do about it. Give him one detail worth looking at, one thing he does with his hands while he talks, and one thing he wants that is not money, which does not come up tonight and is why he will send for them again. Then make the offer and say the number of days out loud. The two ways out of that room are dying while trying to clear the paper, or dying in it today for refusing or for having nothing.
What happens after the job is the table's business rather than the rules'. He may find a reason to keep them. They may discover they are good at this and go looking for the next one. They may run, which is its own story, and it usually starts with the thing he wanted that was not money.
A group that already has a reason to be together can skip all of this. Every other group needs it.
Everything above is true and none of it should take twenty minutes. Played in order, a session opens with people making characters, then standing in a room being told a job, then walking to the place where the job is: three scenes in a row where nobody rolls anything and nothing can go wrong. That is the whole reason a first session drags, and it is easy to fix.
Play the room in about a minute. He states the job flat, names the days, and has them put out of the door. He does not negotiate and he does not explain. A player can say one thing, and it changes nothing, which tells them more about him than a speech would.
Then cut to the job already in progress, at the first thing that actually stands in their way. Not the journey, not the arrival, not the looking around. Blades in the Dark states this better than any rewording of it: do not describe the characters approaching the target, because the approach is the part you skipped, so cut to the first serious obstacle in their path. Whatever they did to get that far, they did offscreen, and if it turns out later that somebody prepared something, say so then.
The obstacle does not have to be violence, and a session that always opens with a knee on somebody's neck gets old by the third one. It is simply whatever this job puts between them and what they were sent for: a gate where the papers are being read properly today, a man who says the thing was collected an hour ago, a room with somebody already in it, a queue they cannot be seen standing in. Name the Threat and its weight inside that first scene, so the dice come out in the first few minutes rather than after twenty of arrangements.
Who they were, what they owe and how they ended up in that room is background rather than a scene. Feed it back a line or two at a time, when it explains something in front of them. Nobody needs a biography read to them before they have anything to do.
The same rule governs the rest of the session. Never play a journey. If the place is two days out, one sentence puts them there, the clock takes its two days, and the road becomes a scene only when something on it is already going wrong.
The job comes with a number of days, and those days are made of real time at the table. Half an hour of play is one day. An hour is two. A job of seven days is a session of about three and a half hours, which is the second reason to say the number out loud: everybody in the room finds out when they are going home.
The clock runs while you are playing and stops while you are not, so a break costs nothing. Travel the job requires is already inside the count, and a place two days out on a seven-day job still leaves seven days of work. Travel nobody sent them on is a different matter: if they decide to go three days out of their way, charge the three days, whatever the hour at the table says. Going somewhere you were not sent is a real decision and it should cost what it costs in the world.
Say each day as it turns, in the world rather than in numbers. The light going. The second market day. The bread getting worse. When one day is left, stop being subtle: tell them plainly that they are not going to finish, name what is still undone, and ask whether they push on or cut their losses. That question is the reason to have a clock at all, and a table that has never played this needs to hear somebody ask it.
When the days run out the job is failed and the characters are alive. Going back to the man who holds their paper is a danger of its own, and so is never going back. Both of those are somewhere for the next session to start.
Keep these two words apart, because the game runs badly when they blur.
An encounter is who the party runs into: a patrol, a family on the road, three trolls arguing about a bridge, a swarm coming down a corridor. It is people and creatures, and by itself it is nothing. Most encounters have no dice in them at all. Some can be talked to, most can be traded with, a few are glad of the company, and the ones who are not are usually still open to being paid or avoided. Decide how they take the party before anybody speaks, and let that be true even when it is inconvenient: merchants who have decided to be difficult, trolls who turn out to be reasonable.
A Threat is only a name. When a situation carries real consequences for a character, for the world, or for the story, you call it a Threat, and that is the entire meaning of the word: it marks the moment where the dice come out. It is not a thing that exists in the world. It belongs to the situation and not to the creature, which is why the same troll is no Threat at all while he is talking and a very clear one when he has somebody by the ankle.
And Light, Heavy and Dire are the weight of what failing costs, never a fact about the creature. A ring of hostile drunks is a Threat with a modest price on it: bruises, maybe a knife. Let somebody call them cowards to their faces and the same drunks are a different Threat, because now nothing will calm them and failing means dying. Nothing about the drunks changed. What failing costs did. When that cost is death or anything as final, the moment is Dire, and you say so plainly before anybody commits.
The Threat is the whole craft of running this game, so learn to write one on your feet. Before you say it aloud, run it against four quick tests.
When a Threat passes those tests, it is almost always one of these. Keep this menu in your head so you stay concrete without ever prescribing the fiction to yourself.
Naming the Threat is only half the beat. The other half is the silence after it, and that silence is where this game actually happens.
You never hand a player a die. You describe the danger, and then you stop talking and let them decide. They may ask what they are risking, which is the best question at this table and should always get a straight answer. They may look for another way, and if they find a real one, the roll you were holding evaporates, which is a good outcome and not a wasted preparation. Only when they commit do you confirm the roll and let them pick up the dice.
That last step matters more than it looks. A player new to this will not know when the dice are wanted, so once they have chosen, say so plainly: "then roll it, keep the highest." The order is what protects them, not your silence. Named danger, free choice, then the roll.
Two habits keep this honest. Offer what the fiction actually holds, including the way out, because a choice between one option and nothing is not a choice. And when a player answers your Threat with something cleverer, let it work: preparation, time, gear, or a better angle can take a Threat off the table entirely, and a table that learns this stops reaching for dice as its first idea.
You can throw the question to the table. Instead of naming the danger yourself, you may ask the players what could go wrong here, take the two best answers, and build the Threat from them. It shares the invention, and a player who has just heard three ways this could ruin them chooses with their eyes wide open. Use it when you want the load shared or the dread thick, and drop it when the table would rather sit back and react. The Threat is still yours to settle; their answers do not bind you.
This is the hardest judgment you will make, so it is the one place in this chapter that earns an illustration. When you name a Threat, you name its weight with it: what does failing this actually cost? Something small is Light. Something real is Heavy. Death, or anything as impossible to take back, is Dire, and Dire is always said plainly before anybody commits.
The weight belongs to the moment, not to the creature, and the same danger does not always weigh the same. A ring of hostile drunks is Light while it is shoving and Heavy once the knives are interested, and it turns Dire the moment somebody insults them past all calming, because now failing means dying. Nothing about the drunks changed. What failing costs did.
Whatever the weight, also know the brush before the dice move: the smaller taste of the consequence that lands on a middle roll. The brush still has to cost something and still has to make sense in the fiction. Name it to yourself first, so a 4-5 never catches you inventing.
Some dangers have no brush at all, and the difference is usually physics or finality:
When a danger will not brush, ask why. When it is simply stubborn, an ordinary risk that resists coming down in size, drop it and choose a Threat that will. When it resists because nothing smaller would leave the character standing and still in the story, it is Dire, and Dire is not a failure of imagination on your part. It is the truth about some dangers, and naming it honestly is the job.
And the weight is what experience remembers. At the end of the session, the moments carried through where failing was Heavy teach, the Dire ones teach twice, and the Light ones were never going to teach anybody anything.
Deciding whether to roll at all is your main lever, more than any Threat you write. Most of the game is played without dice.
When nothing real threatens the attempt, do not reach for the dice to manufacture tension. Say yes and move on.
The clearest way to hold this in your head: the roll is never on the task, it is on the pressure. Nobody rolls to pick a lock. You roll to pick a lock before the patrol comes back round the corner. Take the patrol away and the lock simply opens, in whatever time it takes, because a locked door with all the time in the world and nobody coming is an open door with a delay. So every time your hand goes toward the dice, ask what is pressing on this moment. If you can name it, you have your Threat. If you cannot, there was never a roll here.
When the fiction has made an outcome certain, do not roll either, in either direction. If success is a foregone thing, grant it. If death or failure is a foregone thing, say so plainly and mean it: "if you do this, you die." A certain death takes no roll, and the only thing that saves anyone there is the same thing that saves them everywhere, a life spent. Do not soften a certain death into a roll because you feel bad about it. You told them the truth beforehand; the roll would be the lie.
The players already know these rules. Your part is to run them cleanly and hold one line.
Lay the pool out where everybody can see it before the first scene: one token, plus one for each player. Recognize a spend when you hear it, because there is no keyword. A player who takes over the telling of a landed moment, who narrates the blade going wide or the rope holding, has paid, and the narration is the payment. When that happens, you hand the pen over without argument: the escape works, always, and whoever paid holds the telling. Anybody can pay for anybody, so watch for the hand reaching across the table when the one in danger is not the one reaching.
Then write the smaller [Consequence] together, as the reduced form of the thing that was refused. You hold the pen on the mark with them; it is co-written, and it stays with the body.
Hold this one line and hold it firm: a landed Threat is never narrated away without a token leaving the table. If a player wants the outcome changed and does not pay, your words stand, and they answer them in character. The pen is yours until a token buys it. That is the spine of the whole game, and if you let it bend, nothing under it holds.
When a player dies they finish the adventure by taking over somebody in the fiction, and that lands far better when the somebody already has a name and a face. So plant a few early: the porter hired at the gate, the prisoner the party freed, the guard who has stopped believing her orders. Give each one a name and one clear trait, and keep them near the action. You do not have to use them, but when a body falls in the third hour you want a person standing right there for the player to step into, rather than a stranger you invent in the silence after a death.
A one-shot for Memento Mori. Espilen lies in the marshes of the Babbel province, a morning from the fishing houses of Clavis. The adventure below is the original text, unaltered. The only additions are the short notes in italics, and they do one thing: run it through our system (Threats landing Light or Heavy, Dire Threats, Nine Lives), never hit points. Names in [brackets] await the naming pass.
Stone grows here like cartilage, ribbed and slick with a cold sheen. A maze of tunnels throbs with trickling flow. Valves gape like mouths and pipes pulse like veins. The air tastes metallic, and nothing is still.
Beneath the ground, forgotten both by humans and Schlammfolk, an ancient beast sleeps, constantly exuding toxin-laced water. Ages of seepage raised a marsh and the city of Espilen was built on a bargain: the Schlammfolk drew the poison water down into their underways, and the city fed them through the Well of Peace. Centuries thinned memory. Offerings dwindled to trinkets. Hunger turned to fury. On the brightest fair, the Schlammfolk dropped the square into the tunnels and took hostages. Now the pact lies broken. Track the flow, bargain or battle, and beware the elder sleeper.
In Sakkaris: the Schlammfolk are a dwarven-Eternals line mutated by the beast's seep, so each still carries a sealed Apostle and dies and returns like anyone. The sleeper is nameless and local, older than the maps, and tied to nothing larger.
Every room has a valve and a drain that hold toxic water at ankle depth. Prolonged contact with the water causes minor mutations. Closing any room's inflow valve drains that room, but raises water in all others. When three different valves have been closed in total, the Sleeper awakens and attacks the party.
Running it. Standing in the water too long is a Threat, and its weight is Heavy: failing means a mutation that stays, written as a [Consequence], and the brush of it (4-5) is a passing mark that fades in a day. Going under, being held under, is a Dire Threat: only a 6 keeps it off. The valves are a clock you run in the open. Name the trade every time (this room drains, all the others rise), count the closings out loud, telegraph the second, and give the third as a choice made with the danger in full view. The master valve in room 2 counts as one of the three.
Wreckage of stalls litters the crater. A Schlammfolk, his skin like crusted crab shells, is forcefully splintering wreckage with a two-handed axe, as others drag victims to a gurgling manhole (to 3). High on the wall, a wide-bore pipe leads toward the thrum of machinery (to 2).
Running it. The axe is a Threat, not a health bar. Name it and wait: "he turns before you reach him and that axe comes down where you are standing, and it is the kind of blow that kills. The wall route is still open. What do you do?" If they commit, then confirm the roll. Heavy (1-3) is your life, so a [Nine Life] or you are gone; Light (4-5) clips you, the flat throwing you into the water or the edge taking a finger, a [Consequence]; a 6 puts you inside his reach. Slip past along the wall instead and there is no roll at all. One of the dragged victims is a face for later (see Takeable Bodies).
A cacophony of hissing steam and groaning pumps fills this chamber. A Schlammfolk overseer directs workers at a humming manifold. At center stands a great iron handwheel, the master valve. An open pipe carries voices from the warren (to 4). An ornate, heavily guarded door leads to the throne (to 6).
Running it. A character who studies the manifold can read the whole valve system off it. The master valve dumps half the warren at once and counts as one closing toward the Sleeper. Turning it, slow and loud with the overseer right there, is a Threat: Light, your face is marked and the alarm climbs the pipes; Heavy, the workers are on you before the wheel is round.
Crude iron cages hold weeping humans and Schlammfolk dissidents. The dissidents argue fiercely with the guards in a guttural tongue, debating the attack on the surface. If approached without hostility, one will draw a crude map in the mud, showing a secret way into the Sunken Temple (to 5). They are desperate to be heard by the King. A long ladder climbs toward lamplight (to 4).
Running it. Come in with blood already up and the guards fight and the alarm carries. Come in calm and the dissident deals. Forcing the old locks with a guard near the ladder is a Threat: Light, the cages open but the alarm now runs ahead of you into room 4; Heavy, he is on you mid-latch and the freed are still behind bars. A freed prisoner here is a takeable body.
This wide chamber serves as a living space. Dozens of Schlammfolk are here; some tend to strange fungal gardens, while a tense group squabbles over looted provisions. An ornate, golden door is guarded by two heavily armored Schlammfolk (to 6). Other pipes (to 2), manholes (to 3), and a sealed frog-mask pipe (to 5) lead away. If blood is spilled, alarms carry to adjacent rooms.
Running it. A room to cross, not to clear. Rushing the two armored guards in a hall full of their kin is a certain death you name first ("that gets you killed here; a life, or another way"). The other way is real: the frog-mask pipe, the dissident's secret route, or the squabble over the provisions turning into a fight you did not have to start.
This chamber, once a rich shrine, now is a garbage dump, filled with heaps of trinkets and cheap gifts accumulated over the years. A ruined statue, barely visible, depicts a massive, frog-like creature soothed by water. A lone Schlammfolk dissident hides here. He'll trade secrets if the prisoners in the pens are freed. An ornate, toothed door leads to the throne room (to 6).
Running it. His price is upstream: free the caged in the pens, and he tells you the throne's valve is the deepest one, the one that wakes the beast. The water here is deep in places, and the offerings hide holes in the floor; wading it careless is the drowning Threat, and drowning is Dire.
The ancient Schlammfolk King is fused to his throne of mineral-crusted pipes. He is furious but will parley if his people are unharmed. Killing him dooms Espilen to sink back into marshland. Destroying the throne's valve awakens the Sleeper.
Running it. This is the hinge, and mercy is the sharp choice: he parleys only for a party that kept its hands clean across the warren. Killing him is a certain doom you state plainly first ("kill him and the town has nothing under it, it sinks into the marsh and the freed prisoners go down with it; that is not a risk, that is what happens"), and no roll softens it. The throne's valve is the deepest; shatter it as the third and the Sleeper wakes. He wears the [Runic Pickhammer] as his regnal relic.
Roused from its timeless slumber, a gargantuan toad-like beast, older than any map, thrashes in mindless panic. Blind and in agony, its weeping, stone plated body leaks a toxic ichor, the same enzyme that birthed the marsh and sustains the Schlammfolk. Yet it is a venom that will consume its creator. With the water flows disturbed by your intrusion, the beast must keep moving or be dissolved. And so it shatters the earth, not in rage, but in a desperate flight from its own corrosive flesh.
Running it. Dire, not a boss. There are no numbers to fight it with, and none to fight it. It is a collapsing hall that weeps acid and screams. Every Threat it raises (a ceiling coming down, crossing a flooding hall as it bucks, its bulk swinging through) is Dire: only a 6 keeps it off, and a 4-5 lands in full. Standing to face it is a named certain death. This is the run-or-die finale, and the only reason to stay is to cut out its heart, the [Toxin Savant].
This is a lethal one-shot, so a player will likely die and finish the adventure in someone else's skin. The people to step into are already in the rooms: one of the victims dragged toward the manhole in room 1, a dissident from the pens or the temple, or the Hub overseer if the party turns or spares him. Give each a name and a face the first time it matters, keep them near the action, and stat any of them in a breath by the rules in When You Die.
The hammer of the last true dwarven king, forged before the enzymes remade dwarfkind into the Schlammfolk, now borne by their ruler as a regnal relic. A brutally efficient pick-hammer; its runes spell "LIPES" and glow faintly when near gold.
As a Charged Item (three charges). Its will: the wielder turns to living stone, so the next ordinary physical Threat aimed at the body simply does not land, a blade skidding off, a thrown thing cracking and dropping. Spend a charge and it holds for that one Threat. It does nothing against a Dire Threat (a long fall, drowning, the weight of a collapse), which land as they land on anyone, bought off only with a life. Each spend rolls the magic table (2d6, keep the lowest) for what else manifests: the stone holding too long and rooting you slow and loud, a patch left grey and dead as rock (a [Consequence]), or your own sealed will waking where eyes can feel it.
A mysterious object made of organic matter that's hard like a rock, but is constantly twitching and changing shape into ominous, viscera-like forms. Its surface is constantly wet. Only obtainable by killing the Sleeper and excising its heart. A gentle touch to a weapon, vial, or focus adds a potent poison or purges one poison. A rough grip makes it leak toxic puddles that can have mutagenic effects with prolonged exposure.
As a Charged Item (three charges). Its will is exactly the above: a gentle touch poisons or purges, a rough grip floods the ground with mutagenic ichor, a Threat to everyone standing in the water, the wielder included. Each spend rolls the magic table for what else manifests: the poison more than you meant and spreading, the wet surface weeping ichor up your own arm, or the thing drawing eyes the way carrion draws flies.
Running the whole thing. Three things hold it up. Run the valve clock in the open and make them feel the trade every time. Make mercy the sharp, costly choice: the King parleys only for clean hands, and the freed prisoners are the hostages to it, so do not soften the doom when they ask about killing him. And let the Sleeper's waking be a run, not a fight: Dire the whole way out, no numbers, no boss. Whatever crawls back into the drowning streets of Espilen, changed, marked, a body short, that is the story this one-shot is for.
The one-shot above is one adventure. The Forge builds a different one every time you press the button, drawing on the old Memento Mori tables that Joe wrote in 2024: 778 encounters, 40 rumours, 54 relics and 37 faces, all of them moved into Sakkaris and into this system.
Two character sheets, both interactive and both printable. They share the same engine, so the pack grid computes your load live.
Every rule printed on it, so a new table can play without opening the manual. Prints on two A4 pages, character then pack.
OpenFields, the pack and the weights. The rules live here in the rulebook. Prints on one A4 page.
Open